Charlottesville: How Identity Politics Is Serving the Interests of the Deep State

Has Identity Politics made the liberal/progressive/left deaf, dumb, and blind so their reality is limited to the emotions that Identity Politics produces?

What the liberal/progressive/left is trying to do with Charlottesville is to associate Trump supporters with White Supremacists and in this way demonize Trump supporters so that they will not have a voice when Trump is overthrown in a coup. Or it can be put in a different way: Charlottesville is being used by someone to discredit Trump and the people who elected him in order to pave the way for a coup, and the liberal/progressive/left is enabling the plot.

Upon reflection, I think that for most of the liberal/progressive/left the denunciations and one-sided interpretation of Charlottesville are just the ingrained knee-jerk reaction of people brought up in Identity Politics. In Identity Politics, everyone is a White Hat except racist, sexist, homophobic, gun-nut white males. The only tolerable white males are those who accept this characterization of themselves. All others are “white supremacists” or “nazis.”

Paul Craig Roberts

From what I read on progressive websites, those imbued with Identity Politics are letting the emotionalism of the politics run away with them. My friend, Rob Kall, who is fair and open-minded and posts my columns on OpEdNews, including those to which he takes exception, writes: “Trump is Now the Leader of White Supremacists and Nazis.” Rob reaches this conclusion because Trump held both sides responsible for the violence in Charlottesville. By seeing equivalence between the two sides, “He made it clear that he was siding with the White Supremacists, giving them aid, support and encouragement.” (You might remember Jean Kirkpatrick who denounced liberals for seeing moral equivalence between the Soviet Union and the US.) I doubt this is the way Trump saw his statement. From the news videos I saw, there seemed to be plenty of hate on both sides. Certainly, there is plenty of hate for Trump among progressives.

In the Washington Post, Alexandra Petri finds Trump’s words condemning the violence on both aides to be “despicable words.” Petri apparently thinks that, counter to what the news coverage shows, the counter protesters did not engage in any violence, or else she thinks that violence from this side was justified but not violence from the other side. She condemns Trump for his statement: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.” In her opinion, the last three words, “on many sides” shows that Trump is partial to White Supremacists.

Richard Eskow joins the chorus. He links together deaths in Charlottesville, New York, Portland, Charleston, under “white nationalist terror” and hands them to Trump.

The Daily Kos also equates Trump’s blaming both sides for the violence, which is what the media reports show to be the case, with a defense of “white supremacist/neo-Nazi violence.”

Joe Macare at Truthout tells us that “Truthout will continue to report on the threat of neo-Nazis in the street—as well as those in the White House who are in lockstep with their agenda. We’ll talk to the people organizing against fascism on all fronts. We won’t equivocate or condemn ‘both sides.’ We won’t blame the Nazis’ targets for the hate they receive. But we know that these are not the only faces of racism. Whether it manifests itself in education policy, in gentrification, in economic inequality, in racist policing or in the United States’ immigration and ‘defense’ policies, Truthout will continue exposing white supremacy in all its forms.”

Truthout’s Anna Sutton expresses her “Heartbreak, Anger.” She doesn’t know where to begin. But she sees a fundraising opportunity. Make a donation and Truthout will “tell it like it is” against the “corporate and right-wing media” that are “bending over backwards to normalize Trump and the violence and xenophobia displayed by his rabid followers.” One wonders what corporate right-wing media she is talking about, The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, all of which denounce Trump 24/7?

How do we avoid the question: who is over the top, the “alt-right” at Charlottesville or their progressive critics?

Over at CounterPunch, a remnant of America’s left-wing, John Eskow tells us that he has walked among white supremacists “since I first learned to walk. They surrounded me in blue-collar Utica, New York—an early capitol of Rust Belt America, back in the 1950s.”

Here is Identity Politics’ association of the working class with White Supremacy. The all-powerful, all-threatening White Supremacists could do nothing to prevent—who?—from offshoring their jobs to Asia. But these people, who are so powerless that they could not even save their own jobs, are a great threat to us good people, who sat sucking our thumbs in unconcern while their economic lives were snuffed out.

CounterPuncher John Wight, prior to affirming the dogma that from the very beginning America has been “synonymous with white supremacy,” first unleashes both barrels on the liberal/progressives: “Strident declamations against fascism in Charlottesville from those who supported fascists in Kiev, calls for action to be taken against extremists in America by those who’ve been supporting them in Syria. What is this if not rank hypocrisy?”

Ah, so, why did the liberal/progressives align with the military/security complex and the neoconservatives against Donald Trump who declared, to his undoing, his intention to normalize relations with Russia, thus removing the enemy needed to justify the $1 trillion annual budget of the military/security complex? These vast monies could have gone into health care for the unprovided, into public assistance for the unprovided, but the liberal/progressive/left would not have it. If the liberal/progressives are so against violence and hate, why do they support the hate campaign against Trump and Russia?

Has Identity Politics made the liberal/progressive/left deaf, dumb, and blind such that their reality is limited to the emotions that Identity Politics produces?

This is a valid question. It is not meant to be derogatory. It is meant to lead to an understanding of our plight as a country. How does a country in which blacks are taught to hate whites, women are taught to hate men, and whose history is explained as white oppression successfully deal with the defining issues of our time?

Indeed, such a country is incapable of even recognizing the real issues. It seems clear enough that our doom is certain.

Identity Politics has such a firm hold on universities, media, all sorts of subject areas in public schools such as black studies, women studies, race studies, native American studies, and in Democratic Party politics that reality is absent from the picture. Most of what is deplored by Identity Politics are simply products of history, not of the evil intentions of white males. It once was the case that the function of liberal progressivism was to reform what was inherited from the past and had been morally outgrown.

But this progressive agenda has been abandoned to hate that is just as wrong and deadly as the hate to which the liberal progressives object. So we are left with what: hate against hate. This is not promising.

We have to come back to the question, why is the liberal/progressive/left comfortable with being aligned with the warmonger neoconservatives and the military/security complex against President Donald Trump who intended, until he was blocked, to reduce the extremely dangerous to all of mankind tensions between the US and Russia created over 24 years by the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes? If you are really against violence, why oppose the only president we have had since Reagan who wants to reduce the risk of nuclear conflict?

I have asked this question a number of times. I have never had an answer from the liberal/progressive/left.

Are we to conclude that they are unaware, lost as they are in their hatred of white, heterosexual males, that they don’t care, that they want Trump destroyed even it Pence, the replacement, leads us into unwinnable war with Russia and China?

Why do the environmental and wildlife preservation organizations jump on the anti-Trump bandwagon. Are they unaware of the consequences to all life of nuclear war?

What explains the total unreality in which Americans exist? We are supposed to be the leaders of the world. How can we lead when we are so utterly, hopelessly blind and stupid and consumed by hate?

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About the Author

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts attended four of the finest universities, studied under two Nobel Prize-winners in economics, authored 20 peer-reviewed articles in journals of scholarship, and published four academic press peer-reviewed books, including Harvard and Oxford Universities, and seven commercially published books. His most recent book is The Neoconservative Threat to World Order: Washington's Perilous War for Hegemony.